What’s in a name?

Last week in our Italian class, just as we were finishing, one of our number told us she had learnt a new Italian word which rather pleased her. She had been on one of those guided tours around Manchester and at some point they had come across a statue of John Dalton, known to most of us for his work on atomic theory. The guide leading the group, which contained a number of Italians, told them that this was the man whose name had become part of the word for colour-blind in Italian: daltonico. (Funnily enough it’s the same word on Spanish but the Spaniards helpfully put an accent on it, daltónico, so that you know where to put the stress. The Italians just expect you to find out and remember!

One result of this was that our teacher, Adalgisa, asked us all to try to bring along to the next lesson other “new” words we had discovered during the week. So I duly took along una tangente, the word for a bribe, which stuck me as interesting as it suggested a payment going off at a tangent. From that also arose tangentopoli which became almost the new name for Milan (bribesville) in the early 90s when corruption was being investigated.

One member of the class had misunderstood the instructions and thought he had to invent a new Italian word: quite a nice idea in fact. What he came up with was scuromania, an obsession with keeping everything hidden and obscure. Another person then took up this idea making a verb out of our teacher’s name. Adalgisare now means to run a lesson in dynamic and lively fashion. (Some people will do almost anything to curry favour with the teacher. What’s wrong with a good old-fashioned apple?)

Another chap who was good with words was a certain Mr Charles Dickens who has his 200th birthday today. There’s been quite a lot of fuss on TV and radio and in the press about this, not just in this country either. I may have mentioned that I am re-reading a whole lot of his books at the moment, currently working my way through “A Tale of Two Cities”. There I found a delightful description of Tellson’s Bank, “an old-fashioned place, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty”. I particularly liked the way the bank clerks were described:

“After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson’s down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet Street (......).

Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson’s, the oldest of men carried on their business gravely. When they took a young man into Tellson’s London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment.”

I just love the idea of the young men being carefully ripened until they were deemed ready to deal with the public. Maybe that’s what we needed with some of our bankers recently.

Someone who might need help from the bankers so that he can pay a possible almost €2 million fine is one of my Spanish heroes, cyclist Alberto Contador. Just after he won the 2010 Tour de France, the news broke that in one of the drug tests he had proved positive for some performance-enhancing drug or other. The whole investigation dragged on, appeals were made, excuses were given and he went on to win the 2011 Giro d’Italia and to compete, unsuccessfully this time, in the 2011 Tour de France.

This week the authorities have finally decided that they don’t like his excuses and won’t accept them. So he’s losing his winner’s title to the 2010 Tour and the 2011 Giro, he won’t be able to take part in any competitive cycling until August and as a result will miss the Olympic Games. And on top of that he may have to pay a hefty fine. He’s still maintaining his innocence (the drug got into his system through contaminated beef, apparently) and a lot of cycling big names, such as Eddy Merckx are very upset about the effects on the reputation of cycling as a whole.

I bet they all wish there was a bit more scuromania around!!!

Checking up on facts about Mr Dalton, I discovered that he suffered from discrimination. His family were Quakers, seen as dissenters from the religion of the country, and, as such, he was barred from studying things like Law or Medicine at English universities. He managed to get a good grounding in science and philosophy despite this and in 1793 was given a post at “New College” Manchester, a dissenting college. It sounds as though the old boy network functioned then as well!

Another more gruesome little fact concerns his colour-blindness. One of the things which led him to study this condition was that he was colour-blind (daltonico) himself. Modern scientists today know things about Dalton’s own colour-blindness because his eyeball was preserved and was examined by scientists in 1995: too late to do much about it though!!

A final point: part way through our discussion of new words our teacher struck herself on the forehead (she is given to dramatic, not say striking, gestures) and declared that she had just put two and two together and remembered that there is a John Dalton Street in the centre of Manchester.

Is this a case of word-blindness or famous name-blindness?